Historically, computer system administrators often knew load patterns for their particular workloads. For example, an administrator might know that an accounting workload tends to be busy at the months' end, while an e-commerce application might be busy daily between 3 pm and 10 pm. Unfortunately, as the number of workloads managed by a single person increases, it becomes infeasible for the person to know the resource utilization habits of a given workload over time. This means when that person receives notice (from a management tool or an end user) that a given workload is consuming a lot of resources, it is very time consuming for the administrator to check on a workload's history and determine if the current high utilization is ‘normal’ or represents a problem. Thus, it can be hard to determine whether to respond to high utilization by adding resources or by trying to fix a problem.
Herein, related art is described to aid in understanding the invention. Related art labeled “prior art” is admitted prior art. Related art not so labeled is not admitted prior art. The invention is described below with reference to the following drawing.